Books Are My Version of Holiday Snapshots

I don't take a lot of pictures when I travel.  I don't know if it's because I'm very observant and detail-oriented that I try to take in everything and that I've got a vault for a memory, but I don't often take pictures because I keep them all in my head.

Instead I remember my days by the books I bought. The first day in Amsterdam coincided with the book sale on the Spui. I was so early that I had to wait around, but some good books were found.


Lafcadio Hearn "Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan"

Ernest Hemingway "A Farewell to Arms" Modern Library 1st Edition in immaculate condition with dust jacket and protective cover, plus no marks of any kind inside the book

Martin Gardner "The Night Is Large: Collected Essays 1938 - 1995"

"Lovers, Mates, and Strange Bedfellows: Old World Folktales" Arranged and Edited by James R. Foster

The last book is a sort of tongue-in-cheek collection of folktales that center around love, love, and more love that the book's preface calls "a precious part of our literary heritage" and that "no liberties" have been taken with the substance of the narratives.  The volume contains 40 folktales with titles such as "The Girl Who Was Half-Married", "The Perspiring Lover", and "Hacon Grizzlebeard".

Definitely an interesting addition to my lifelong obsession with building a collection of fairytales & folktales to rival the Opies.

I actually bought all three of the books from the same bookseller on the Spui that morning, but because I was so early, I passed three times before I had spent as much money as I wanted to on my first day of vacation.

Martin Gardner for those who aren't familiar was a fascinating person.  He wrote often about mathematics and science and had a wide array of interests and talents.  I learned of Gardner from his book "My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles" as a teenager, and was later amused to learn that the same math geek whose puzzles I so enjoyed had annotated Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland", which somehow managed to debunk and add nonsense to the original book.

Some of the more amusingly titled essays to be found in this collection include: "Klingon and Other Artificial Languages", "Puzzles in Ulysees", and "The Significance of Nothing".  All the essays are worth reading and like I said Gardner is a great read, perhaps the closest that America ever came to having their own Borges (Henry Miller doesn't count).

For those familiar with Lafacdio Hearn's "Kwaidan" and how little there seems to be of his work in English nowadays, you'll understand why it's always "yes" to adding some more Hearn to the library.  Few foreigners ever lived abroad anywhere and produced such beautiful writing as a result.  I would put Hearn slightly above Pierre Loti and just below Karen Blixen, but she has long been one of my favourite writers (I discovered her at age 10).

And to prove I am both pretentious about my literature and superficial I bought Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" because it was a beautiful edition, but just between vous et moi I have never read anything by Hemingway from start to finish save "The Old Man and The Sea", which I loved, yet I can't go more than 4 pages into Hemingway without thinking of something else I'd rather be reading or doing.

Near the University of Amsterdam there is a passage.  If you walk through it to take a shortcut to the Oudezijds Achterburgwal when the booksellers aren't set up inside it's usually rather bleak, but that particular day I scored a free copy of G.K. Chesteron's "The Complete Father Brown".  On another visit, this time when the booksellers were set up almost lost the chance to bring home a copy of John Fante's "Full of Life".  It'd been put down for a moment, and there was another interested party, but I hovered and the moment he said no, I snatched it back.

So yes, don't mess with me when it comes to books.  I don't like to let them get away.  Book purchasing is not like sport fishing to me.  I have a whole ritual of search, purchase, and then a gloating period over good coffee.

Five books bought, and one found for free.  I thought there would be more but my favourite bookshop in Amsterdam wasn't open any of the times I passed by, so who knows what goodies I missed?

So since I've no real pictures from Amsterdam (though I have a sneaking suspicion some were taken), here are the books.

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Read JRR Tolkien's Roverandom

@alex********* Realise I have never #read any Tolkien. Should I? 

 Yes I said.

The Hobbit has the best first line ever.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

Then I remembered the first Tolkien book I ever read, Roverandom, when after years of struggling against the geek tide I decided to read some Tolkien. It was in a pile of random books for 4 euros at one of the used English bookshops near Odeon. I bought it because the shop didn't have anything else by Tolkien and it was cheap.

Fourish years later, I'm better versed in the world of JRR Tolkien. I've read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and bits from The Simarillion. I know enough that I can see where Tolkien and fellow member of The Inklings, C.S. Lewis lifted (with permission) ideas from one another for Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia (though I prefer Tolkien's Ents to Lewis' sometimes treacherous trees). Still, I love Roverandom more than any other work of Tolkien's.

From the book's jacket:

While on holiday in 1925 young Michael Tolkien lost his beloved toy dog on the beach.

To console him, his father, J.R.R. Tolkien, invented a story about a real dog who is turned into a toy by a wizard and sent by a 'sand-sorcerer' to the moon and under the sea.

More than 70 years later, the adventures of the dog Rover, also known as 'Roverandom'...relate the story to sources ranging from the Norse sagas to E. Nesbit, and link it also to Tolkien's other fiction, including The Hobbit, the 'Father Christmas' letters, and The Simarillion.

The origin of the story gets more page space in the Introduction.

In the summer of 1925, JRR Tolkien, his wife Edith, and their sons John (nearly eight), Michael (nearly five), and Christopher (not yet one year old) went on holiday to Filey, a town on the Yorkshire coast which is still popular with tourists.  It was an unexpected holiday, in celebration of Tolkien's appointment as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, which he was to take up on 1 October that year; and it was perhaps intended as a period of rest for him before he not only assumed that post, but for two terms would continue to teach at the University of Leeds, as his old and new appointments overlapped.  For three or four weeks at Filey - as explained below, the dates are uncertain - the Tolkiens rented an Edwardian cottage which may have belonged to the local postmaster, built high on a cliff overlooking the beach and sea.  From this vantage point the view to the eat was unobstructed, and young John Tolkien was thrilled when for two or three beautiful evenings the full moon rose out of the sea and shone a silver path across the water.

At this time Michael Tolkien was extremely fond of a miniature toy dog, made of lead and painted black and white.  He ate with it and slept with it, and carried it around with him; he was reluctant to let it go even to have his hand washed.  But during the holiday at Filey he went for a walk with his father and elder brother, and in the excitement of skimming stones into the sea put his toy down, onto the beach of white shingle.  Against this background the tiny black and white dog became virtually invisible , and was lost.  Michael was heartbroken when his toy could not be found, although the two older boys and their father searched for it that day and the next.

The Introduction goes on the extent to which the story of Roverandom had on Tolkien's output after 1925 - parts of what would eventually be Roverandom appear in a story-letter Tolkien wrote to his children in December of 1927 under the guise of 'Father Christmas', a series of letters which he had begun writing in 1920 and would write until 1943.

The earliest extant text of Roverandom is one of four versions among the Tolkien papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.  One fifth of it has been lost, equivalent to the present chapter 1 and the first half of chapter 2.  The remainder is 22 pages possible torn from school exercise books with numerous emendations followed by three typewritten versions, likewise undated, in the course of which Tolkien progressively enlarged the story and made many improvements of expression and details but no major change of plot.  The first typescript, on thirty-nine heavily corrected pages, was closely based on the manuscript and has been of great help in deciphering the less legible parts of the earliest version. 

In 1936 Tolkien's manuscript for The Hobbit was accepted by the publishers George Allen & Unwin, and though it was not yet a success the publisher asked him to submit other children's stories.  He obliged by sending to Allen & Unwin his picture book Mr Bliss, his mock-medieval story Farmer Giles of Ham, and Roverandom.

Stanley Unwin gave Roverandom to his young son Rayner to appraise.  Rayner reported in January 1937 that he found the story "well written and amusing"; but despite his positive review it was no accepted for publication.  Roverandom was apparently one of the 'short fairy stories in various styles' that Tolkien had (it was thought) practically ready for publication in October 1937, was Stanley Unwin noted in a memo; but by the The Hobbit was so successful that Allen & Unwin wanted a sequel, with more about hobbits, above all else, and Roverandom seems never again to have been considered either by author or publisher.  Tolkien's attention was now directed towards 'the new Hobbit', the work that would become his masterpiece: The Lord of the Rings.

From Roverandom and the other stories that were popular with Tolkien's children came Tom Bombadil, who was based on a Dutch doll that belonged to Michael Tolkien. And Tolkien's style.  Here one can see Tolkien having a bit of fun.  His delight as he indulged in wordplay.  Near-homonyms like Persia and Pershore.  Onomatopoeia and alliteration galore - 'yaps and yelps, and yammers and yowls, growling and grizzling, whickering and whining, snickering and snarling, mumping and moaning'. Descriptive lists of humourous length - paraphernalia, insignia, symbols, memorandum, books of recipes, arcana, apparatus, and bags and bottles of miscellaneous spells.  Unexpected turns of phrase - "The Man-in-the-Moon vanished immediately into thin air; and anyone who has never been there will tell you how extremely thin the moon-air is".  Roverandom contains a number of 'childish colloquisms' - whizz, splosh, tummy, and umcomfy which are of particular interest for their like is rarely met with in Tolkien's published writings, having been omitted ab initio in his manuscripts or deleted in revision as tummy was altered in The Hobbit to stomach.  

It is here one can see where Tolkien drew his inspiration from - Norse sagas, the Red and White Dragons of British legend, Arthur and Merlin, mythical sea-dwellers abound, the Midgard serpent, the Psammead books of E. Nesbit, Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and Sylvie and Bruno, even Gilbert and Sullivann.

With intending to I read Tolkien's works as I would recommend them - Roverandom, The Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit. I know most would think The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings should be reversed, but because I had already seen the movies, I wanted to keep Bilbao's story a bit of a mystery. It might seem silly, but that's how I went about it even though I bought a copy of The Hobbit second and got a copy of Lord of the Rings fourth (I found a pdf of The Simarillion online third, but didn't poke through it too much as I was told to not read it before reading the The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings).

But my answer to the question of why one should absolutely read Tolkien is still Roverandom.  To start with Roverandom is to see Tolkien's own quest, so wonderfully and well-managed. It is undeniable that Tolkien started as a natural and gifted story teller, but it gives the first record of how Tolkien kept at it and persisted and became a legend of a writer.

Even having seen all of the films, I can honestly say that I loved reading Lord of the Rings. I found a few faults with it, mind you, but I loved opening the book and returning to Middle Earth. It gave me faith as a writer to be quite honest. It gave me hope that one day I might write a book that someone couldn't wait to get back to because let's face it, that's just about the best compliment you can give a book isn't it?

Roverandom also has some of Tolkien's most whimsical illustrations, here's the one from the cover.

This post made me want to read all of Tolkien's works again. I don't think this will be the last time I feel this way. 

Other posts about Tolkien on this blog:

- The Hobbit  

- Fairie Stories 

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World Book Day

In honour of World Book Day I decided today I'd spend my day with some books. You know, like every day.

I started by taking a peek as the first book of "The Hunger Games". There are movie posters plastered all over Paris. I started getting curious. I read about twenty pages or so, but stopped because I kept thinking of another book, Koushun Takami's "Battle Royale". Apparently I'm not the only one that thought this.

I look around my desk. There's a worn paperback copy of Richard Jeffries' "After London & Wild England", a copy of Eugene Zamiatin's "We" (which heavily inspired Orwell's "1984"), and a near pristine copy of Takami's "Battle Royale"... I notice that all three books are about a future gone horribly wrong.

This isn't the only theme of the books I find on my desk this afternoon, though it's the most obvious.

Stacked up on the corner are: Dante's "Purgatorio", Sawako Ariyoshi's "The River Ki", Morio Kita's "The Fall of the House of Nire", Andersen's "Fairy Tales" illustrated by Arthur Szyk, [W. Somerset] "Maugham on Kipling", "The Travels of Marco Polo", and Alberto Manguel's "Dictionary of Imaginary Places".

Those books all share a common denominator in a way that makes sense to me. They each contain something important. That's the thing. I don't read for pleasure any more. Not really. The act of reading is a pleasure in itself, but I read for the sake of perfecting my craft as a writer nowadays. I want to see the style, the way ideas were developed, and how the writing is overall.

I asked on Twitter today "What's your favourite book?" Your one favourite. The book you could not live without reading again. It's a question that I cannot even answer simply myself. The books that spring to mind are not books I've read to perfect my craft as a writer. They are instead, the books that made me want to be a writer in the first place.

The books. Not just one book. I cannot point to a single book and say after reading it that I knew I wanted to be a writer. The books that come to mind, most of them are books I wish I'd written myself. In the instance of W. Somerset Maugham's "The Razor's Edge" I wish I'd written each and every single word. Maugham is, without overthinking it, my favourite author (in the English language). I still wax poetic about one his short stories, "Rain" every chance I get. He is the author that has the something I wish and hope I have as a writer.

Writers I'd love to borrow talent from could be their own list. Colette, Nabokov, George Orwell,  Mikhail Bulgakov, Ken Kesey, Yukio Mishima, and Henry Miller along with Maugham would top this list.

Then there's the ideas I wish I'd come up with myself.  

Discovering a world in a wardrobe.

A wrongly imprisoned man uses a treasure to seek revenge.

Satan comes to Moscow.

A cat narrates the lives of Japan's middle class.

(Books in order: C.S. Lewis "The Chronicles of Narnia", Alexandre Dumas Pere "La comte de Monte Cristo", Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita", Natsume Soseki's "I Am A Cat")

Or first lines.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

You better not never tell nobody but God.

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

Walking back to camp through the swamp, Sam wondered if he should tell his father what he had seen.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

(Books in order:  JRR Tolkien "The Hobbit", JD Salinger "The Catcher In the Rye", Sylvia Plath "The Bell Jar", Franz Kafka "The Metamorphosis, Alice Walker "The Color Purple", C.S. Lewis "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader", E.B. White "The Trumpet of the Swan", George Orwell "1984")

Then I think back to my first books. The fairy tales stories; the books written for children; the books that seemed written for children, but were for adults too; and then the books I read that weren't for children.

Mitch Hedburg said, "any book is a kid's book if the kid can read". He obviously never read Flaubert's "Madame Bovary", which I read first at age 12 and completely misunderstood. I've read it many times since at 14, 22, and aged 28. At each point in its reading I have had a different gut reaction to the story. This is why it's one of my favourite books.

When it comes to my absolute Top Five Desert Island books, it's hard to make a final selection. This indecisiveness hovers because I can't make up mind about what or which criteria is most important to me.

So fine I'm going to pick five. But I'm not going to hold myself to it. Because I'm going to read all my life. I'll never stop. It's a lifelong disease I've got. Can't walk past a bookshop without having a book. Wouldn't surprise me a bit if I perished in a fire unable to be put out because I, known to the neighbours as the Crazy Book Lady fell asleep chain smoking in a room piled to the ceiling with hardly flame retardant books.

But fine. Here they are:

My Top Five Desert Island Books:

1. George Orwell, "1984"

2. W. Somerset Maugham "The Razor's Edge"

3. R.L. Stevenson's "Treasure Island"

4. Alexandre Dumas Pere "La comte de Monte Cristo"

5. A book of collected fairy tales

I tried to stay away from series of books otherwise "The Chronicles of Narnia", which I read in part or in full every year and have since I was a kid (along with "La comte de Monte Cristo") would have made the list. I might have also picked Mishima's "The Sea of Fertility" tetralogy, of which the first book in the series, "Spring Snow", is one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read.

"1984" will always be on the list. I never knew books like "1984" existed until I read it. I felt the same way when I read Orwell's "Animal Farm".

"Treasure Island" makes the list because the edition I have in my library includes Stevenson's essay from "The Art of Writing" that made me realise that it was time for me to try being a writer and stop feckin' about.

But it's the book of fairy tales that gave me the most trouble. I couldn't pick which collection it'd be. I'd want the complete set of Andrew Lang's "Fairy Books" with me. I'd want a copy of "The Brothers Grimm". I'd want the encyclopedia of fairy tales I had as a child called "Le cabinet des fées", which had forty volumes and is so precious that I refuse to re-read my childhood copy because it's quite old and sentimental to me.

I think to myself for a moment. Would those be my favourite books? The first books I ever loved? Cherished? They're still precious to me. But I cannot remember their stories as vividly as I can recall others.

I look at the shelves. There's about 1,700 books in the library. A hundred of them probably a favourite.

When people come to the house they're always amazed by the library. I tell them it's not even one half of my actual library. There's another 17,000 + books in storage. Then there's the books I want to have in my library and my visions of what this library will be like. What kind of bookshelves I want. How much space I'll dedicate to a library. (A lot.) How it will be organised.

Once I have more library space, I tell them, the first books I plan to buy is a reading copy of "Le cabinet des fées". I will put my childhood copy safely behind glass (there will be bookshelves with glass doors for rare books and first editions) and will dedicate an entire section of my library to fairy tales and mythology. There will be shelves devoted to children's books, reference books, poetry, fiction, philosophy...

I go on.

I will build my library inspired by the collecting and collections of Andrew Lang, Captain Sir Richard Burton (I already have a rare 16 volume set of his Arabian Nights), Jorge Luis Borges (I am a big collector of his works), and of course Peter and Iona Opie - who left their impressive collection to The Bodelian Library at Oxford containing:

A collection of works written or published for children, or related thereto, mainly British, totalling c. 20,000 items, put together from the mid 1940s to the early 1980s as a private research resource, rich in terms of rarity and deep in terms of quantity of variant editions, ranging in date from the 16^th to the 20^th century, including c. 800 18^th century books. Includes much of Roland Knaster’s collection, strong in foreign books and books of the 1920s and 1930s. Arranged in c. 20 categories, relating either to form or subject (when a category contains a good proportion of early books it is subdivided into pre- and post- 1850): stories (over 1,400 pre-1850 and 2,700 post-1850 items); books of instruction (over 360 pre-1850 and 280 post-1850 items); fables, legends, and fairy tales (over 1,200 items); biography and history (over 270 pe-1850 and 250 post-1850 items); moveables (over 70 pre-1850 and 470 post-1850 items); natural science (over 280 pre-1850 and 450 post-1850 items); primers and alphabets (over 340 pre-1850 and 320 post-1850 items); travel and geography (over 200 pre-1850 and 100 post-1850 items); periodicals and annuals (over 40 pre-1850 and 900 post-1850 items);games and pastimes (over 90 pre-1850 and 1,200 post-1850 items); religious instruction (over 360 pre-1850 and 290 post-1850 items); toy-books (over 1,000 items); nursery rhymes (over 1,000 items); poetry and verse (over 540 pre-1850 and 770 post-1850 items); keepsakes and miscellanies, almanacs and birthday books (over 40 pre-1850 and 160 post-1850 items); drama (over 190 items); music (over 170 items); foreign languages (over 1,300 items); hornbooks, cabinets, etc.; copy, exercise and drawing books; manuscripts and original artwork; ephemera. Accompanying the collection are records of the books: catalogue cards, accession diaries, notes loosely inserted into books, etc. Acquired by the Bodleian in 1988 after a public appeal, Iona Opie donating half the value of the collection.

20,000 items, I say excitedly. I don't go into the specifics - that's just for your benefit. I revel in my bibliomania a little more. I confess all my dreams and plans.

When they've suffered through all of that (but I can't help myself) they say "they don't have the money" or "they don't have the space" to indulge their own love of books, but like me they have books they love and lists of books they want to read and sometimes books they hope they'll write.

And that's when my heart breaks a little. I don't go into the stories about how I have starved for books. How I've sacrificed. How I've traveled the world for them and with them. I'm proud of my library, but the purpose has always been to one day share it. 

One day I'll have a house in Amsterdam with a TARDIS front door. A house that like the TARDIS is bigger on the inside. I will make cakes and invite people to tea for interesting conversations about books. I will serve delicious dinners to guests who will gravitate towards the library, who won't hear me calling them to the dining room because they're lost in a book.  I will open my library up to children who can come and look at the books in the collection and read and have little paper library cards like I did when I was a child.

The first book I ever took out of a library with my library card was about coccinelle, ladybugs to Americans, what you call ladybirds in the UK. They became my favourite insect. Nearly 30 years later I still have a special fondness for them. I still remember their wings beat faster than a hummingbird's. It's probably because of that book that I ran outside on a cold grey day to take this photograph.

This is what I can see by turning my head to look out of the window next to my desk.

Happy World Book Day, books. Every day should be World Book Day.

  
 

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Me, You, and My Desk

My desk last week...

Last week I tweeted this pic of my desk, which is really a dining table, and still not nearly large nor strong enough to endure what I inflict upon it from slumping, to spilling beverages, and of course all the books that I pile on it.

I'm a creature of habit if I'm allowed to be. I keep my ashtray and ciggies always on the left (I can still type damn fast with just my right hand); coffee cup always on the right, just above my Traveler's Notebook opened up to whatever notes or drawings I'm working from; while the remote for the stereo goes on the left, my phone goes on the right.

Oh and I enjoy working on my old trusty backup computer and have for long enough now that I've completely forgotten to call the place and send it back because it's still under warranty (the HD wheel came off the groove is what I'd bet on).

And then everyone other spot is for books, books, books!

So here's the list that is currently taking up residence on my desk.

JRR Tolkien - Tree Leaf, Smith of Wootton Major, & The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth

Olaf Stapledon - Starmaker

Eliphas Levi - The History of Magic

Joseph Campbell - The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Wannée - Kook Boek (A Dutch cookbook from the 50's)

Simon Winchester - The Professor and The Madman

J.L. Borges  - Extraordinary Tales, Collected Fictions, The Book of Fantasy

Robertson Davies - High Spirits

Isabel Allende - The House of The Spirits

Vincent van Gogh - Selected Letters

Melissa Franklin - Nymphs, Horses, & Athletes

Thomas de Quincey - Confessions of An Opium Eater 

Nabokov - Lectures on Literature

Comte de Lautremont - Les chants de Maldoror

Herman Hesse - Siddhartha

Sylvia Plath - Ariel

Jeryzi Kosinski - The Painted Bird

Stieg Larsson - The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Iona and Peter Opie - The Classic Fairy Tales

Haruki Murakami - 1Q84 (still unfinished)

Now these are just the books that end up my desk.  There are also piles of books that were once on the desk and are now on the chair or stacked on top of the chessboard or put on the bookshelf in such a way that I'll be able to find it easily. 

The only reason why I'm bringing this up at all is because I recently watched a fascinating little film with Alan Moore, who, after seeing this picture went to the top of my list of people I'd like to discuss books with. Not only because Moore is undoubtedly brilliant and probably has some crazy books that I might never know otherwise, but because let's face it Alan Moore might actually be a wizard capable of alchemy. If he's not, then no one else on earth comes as close as he does.

Now that's a small amount of books, but it's a visual clue too. When books become stacked in messy piles it means there's books to stack in messy piles. Books that are separated from the others for reasons known only to the one who selects them.

The reason I chose these books that I must have within immediate grasp varies. Sometimes it's because I like the style of how the writer writes such as with Nabokov. Or the book could simply have a good opening line (The first line of Tolkien's The Hobbit being my favourite from any book.). Or the subject matter is intriguing.  Then there are the books that are for reference. Or the books that are "bibles" like Campbell's and The Golden Bough.

In a book of conversations between Borges and Richard Burgin, Borges says that deep down to be a writer is to be a sort of librarian. I do not disagree with this and would in fact go one step further and say that the right book can be a sort of "grimoire" that helps the writer cast their spell (and like any magic, one needs practise and will likely turn out some toads).

For me that lightning clap - where I fall in love with a word or sentence or style or character or in the best cases the story itself - happens with a happy frequency.

In the course of writing this blog post another Borges book has made it on to the desk. I've just noticed a copy of W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn hiding under a stack. A book on Korean folklore. And I'm itching to pull down Bullfinch's  Age of the Fable...

When I go over to the bookshelves so I don't forget this time to add it to the collection I remember I also wanted to peek at Italo Calvino's Italian Fairy Tales again and look up some archetypes in Vol. 12 of Jung's Collected Works and then it was oh, I forgot I had that book and this book...

Poor desk. It's groaning again. And for all of you who read the blog in 2011, I just wanted to say a big thank you. You kept me coming back to my desk - and though it didn't amount to a book, it kept me writing, and I'm very grateful for that!

Happy New Year!

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The Westerkerk's bell is ominous. . .

I haven't been blogging because this trip to be honest, I haven't been doing much of anything except staring at a Word document and wishing words of brilliance would just magically appear (they don't). Sitting in a bamboo chair with a bright purple cushion, staring out at the balcony full of plants (including a naughty plant), and the words aren't coming.

The backs of the houses I can see surround a private garden shared by those who have property on the street level called a hofje in Dutch that is sort of like a courtyard. In Amsterdam the most famous hofje is located on the Spui, called the Begijnhof. There will be, next to the Esprit Cafe a beautiful wooden door and a miniscule little sign. You might see people coming in and out of it. Go inside and take a look.

But for me this view is a bit like Hitchcock's Rear Window, except of course I hope I don't witness a murder. I can see so much of what is going on inside that it's too tempting to not look from time to time (and to be fair I leave the curtains open in case anyone wants to have a look at me). It does inspire me a bit since back at home the view I get when I look at the window is mostly windowless building walls.

So yesterday I got it in my head that I wanted to go scour the Waterlooplein market for vintage clothes. If you love vintage clothes, Amsterdam is a good city for it. Amongst the 9 Straatjes, the Nine Streets (in the Jordaan area) you have lots of shops, but also along the route to Waterlooplein on Nieuwe Hoogstraat there are plenty more including another location for Zipper, which does great mens vintage. On the Waterlooplein you can also find another Episode vintage store, but I think the one on Berenstraat is much better.

I start wandering toward the Waterlooplein, but first I need to withdraw cash. One thing that drives me a bit batty about Holland is that my French bank card isn't accepted at the Albert Hein grocery store or pretty much anywhere else and some of my other complaints are that finding a cash machine, post office, or tobacco shop are pretty tough to do without memorising what is where and how far from this or that.

For example I stay in the Jordan area near Elandsgracht. There are two cash machines on Elandsgracht. One inside the Albert Hein and one outside. There is a tobacco shop on the Elandsgracht, but it's for some reason usually closed which means I either have to go up to the Rozengracht (at Westerkerk) because there's a post office drop off box along the Prisengracht and a tobacconist on the Rozengracht near the other Albert Hein, which doesn't have a cash machine.

And that's just when I'm located at the flat. When I'm out and about, all the other locations come into play. I'm pretty sure how the Dutch handle it is they do everything in their neighbourhood before they go anywhere else. I've been trying to watch the ebb and flow of the locals in my neighbourhood a little bit, and I'm starting to get the sense that why the Amsterdam morning starts later than in Paris is partly for this reason. People are waiting for the tobacconist, post office, and banks to open up at 10 and 11 and since the cafes open at around 8 or 9 (compared to 5 or 6 in Paris), they have coffees and read newspapers while they wait?

These are just some of my observations and they certainly don't apply to all the Amsterdammers. I've seen men hauling garbage and cleaning sidewalks along Warmoerstraat as early as 6 am and there is one place that opens early to accomodate people who work earlier than people living in the posh Jordaan area called Renee's Croissants (it opens at 6h30).

I withdraw cash at Dam Square and continue eastwards. After hitting the shops at Nieuwe Hoogstraat, I continue on to Waterlooplein, but the first thing I pick up in one of the piles on the ground (which can sometimes be as cheap as 1,00 euro a stuk,  piece) that smells like . . . there is no other word for it than butt. It smelled like a dirty butt.

The smell turned me off of looking at clothes (must remember this for the future as was so turned off I could barely even look at my own clothes to put on pj's last night) and thus I turned to books. I turned to books big time.

By the time I arrived home (after a quick stop at the Albert Hein to buy things to cook for dinner) I bought:

The Finnegans Wake Experience, Roland McHugh, Irish Academic Press, 1 euro (Waterlooplein)

A Dictionary of Historical Slang, Eric Partridge, Penguin Reference Books, 5 euros (Book passage*)

Flash and Filligree & The Magic Christian, Terry Southern, 1 euro (Waterlooplein)

White Fang, Jack London, Nelson's Library edition, 4 euros (Book passage*)

Happy Days, Samuel Beckett, Evergreen/Grove, 4,50 euros (Book Exchange)

The Dream Life of Balso Snell &

A Cool Million, Nathaniel West, New Directions, 4 euros (Book passage*)

There's No Business, Charles Bukowski illustrated by R.Crumb, Ecco edition, 6 euros (Book passage*)

* Now let me tell you where this book passage is because it's not far from Waterlooplein and just south on the same canal as Book Exchange on Kloveniersburgwal.

The same booksellers that sell in the "book passage" seem to also make an appearance at the Friday booksale on the Spui. I went of course on Friday and bought three books.

A Good Man is Hard to Find & Other Stories, Flannery O'Connor, 4 euros

Enduring Love, Ian McEwan, 6 euros

The Best of Roald Dahl, hardcover, 5 euros

My favourites out of my two days worth of purchases so far are the Flannery O'Connor stories and the opening to Nathaniel West's The Dream Life of Balso Snell. They're both writers of the grotesques so that might be what appeals to me at this moment. I'm also still enjoying my flirtation with the Beats Burroughs and Kerouac. I'm also remembering why Roald Dahl is such an inspiration to me, hoping to find Anton Corjbin's art book Control in a used bookshop, and planning to write like mad today.

Or at least read.

The cat eats the naughty plant, and apparently that's okay for the kitty. Since I'm housesitting I'm also tending to the naughty plant and you have to break off any of the yellowing leaves, so I couldn't resist setting up this photo (and pressing one of the leaves into my notebook).

Speaking of which, I'll be blogging about my new notebook purchase next!

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Banned Books

My near recent purchase of Henry Miller's Olympia Press of Sexus got me to thinking about banned books. I'm pretty sure in the Who's Who of Banned Books Miller would be pretty high on the list, but there are books that have been banned that one might not think of. like Huckleberry Finn for example (because Twain used the "n" word in a way that made him the Chris Rock of his day).

Racist?

As one can imagine France isn't one for censoring or banning books. In fact if it hadn't been for a loophole in French law that had no right to govern over works not printed in French (thanks to Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press for that) then the world might never have read Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, The Rosy Cruxifixition (all Miller's works probably), or James Joyce's Ulysses. The only book I can think of that has been banned in France is Claude Guillon's "Suicide mode de l'emploi" (Suicide, a user's manual), but it also got a law saying you couldn't encourage people in any way to off themselves and the book has been since made illegal to sell or own.

You can't speak about countries that are big on censoring books without mentioning the obvious like the US or China, but how about Ireland? Censorship in Ireland was so rampant it has its own Wiki page at least up until 1998 (no books have been banned in the Republic of Ireland since). In 1922 however the list of banned books in Ireland added up to 1200 titles.

But the reality is some of the best books have at one time or another been banned. Here are what I consider in my opinion to be the best books ever banned:

1. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Not only was this book banned in the US and Ireland, but it contains within it an example of a "banned book" - John the Savage has only two books, one being the collected works of Shakespeare which are banned in The World State of Huxley's brave new world.

2. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
Another "classic" of American literature that was banned. Not hard to imagine why. The pages drip with sex, drugs, profanity, anti-war sentiment, and religion. It was as if Vonnegut set out to write a book that would be banned. Continuing with the trend in SH5, another once banned book is mentioned this time it's Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls (which Vonnegut must have hated as it's only read in absence of anything else to read).

3. Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
Phonies! Considering all the bad karma surrounding Holden Caufield you'd think this book would still be banned, but the reality is that because it's on many required reading lists in the US, it's a consistently top-selling book year after year.

4. Animal Farm, George Orwell
Snowball and his farm friends caused so much controversey that it was banned because American miltiary officials believed it would offend the Soviet Union. Plus it also features a Droste effect like Brave New World and Slaughterhouse Five as within the story as Minimus is banned for "Beasts of England".

5. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Everything printed is burned in Bradbury's dystopian opus, but it's banned first. So is thinking for yourself. Bradbury chose the title because book paper burns at 451 degrees Fahrenheit.

If the ALA's list of banned and challenged books is any indication there is a "formula" that if followed might lead to your book being banned in today's day and age. Write books for children that mention religion (poor Philip Pullman as The Dark Materials trilogy is amazing); mention your religious viewpoint (even if that viewpoint includes vampires and werewolves); or write about gay penguins (or anything involving homosexuality for that matter).

1,536 challenges due to “sexually explicit” material;
1,231 challenges due to “offensive language”;
977 challenges due to material deemed “unsuited to age group”;
553 challenges due to “violence”
370 challenges due to “homosexuality”; and
121 challanged due to "religious view point:"

If only the ALA would accept challenges for poor writing...

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Sexism in Literature

"This is going to sound sexist," he says warningly, "but American woman writers are just awful..."

Sexism, still alive and well in literature apparently.

He then proceeds to knock Eudora Welty, whom I consider a damn fine female writer, but my head is still spinning from the whole American woman writers bit. I am seriously offended. Eudora Welty is to me one of the best short story writers in American literature. Nevermind she was a she. Her work still holds it own in the male-dominated world of literature.

I ask for examples. He looks in a book of Welty's collected short stories. He reads until he is annoyed and stops. He blurts out "as full of himself as a colt". It's a metaphor I say and probably one she grew up hearing since she was from the South. He goes on saying Welty is "too clever, too effusive, trying to hard to be clever".

I don't want to sound snobby here but until you have examined a vast proportion of a writer's work you cannot judge their writing. You can judge the work on its own merits, but not the writer him-or-herself. I loved W. Somerset Maugham because the first thing I read were his short stories. Then I decided to read Of Human Bondage and didn't like it as much. Now that I've read nearly everything that Maugham ever wrote I can still earnestly and with authority say he is one of the best writers to ever write. Sure he's slightly outdated now, but I don't give a fig. I have yet to find a book that is as witty and sharp as The Razor's Edge. I can nearly recite his short story "Rain" verbatim.

He sits down in the chair and opens up a book of Alice Munroe's Selected Stories. He doesn't approve. He gives Munroe the same treatment he gave poor Eudora. The language is too precious he says.

Now he or you or I have as much right to not like a writer for whatever reason we want. The writing might not be to our tastes or the subject of the book or story might bore us. Yes, everyone might be named Rose. Yes they might write lines like "she understood Char was beautiful". But if you could hear what he's saying now (which basically boils down to backtracking faster than a politican), you'd probably feel the same way as I do which is, how dare you take my books off my shelf and then proceed to butcher some of my favourite writers (Well I'm not a fan of Munroe's. I bought her book because I wanted to see what happens when you take another writer's style and make no effort to reshape it into your own.)?!?!

I ask him, "Do you understand that Eudora Welty is considered one of the finest American writers of all time and a master of the short story?"

No, he doesn't care. He doesn't care about a writer's reputation.

"If you don't care about a writer's reputation, then why do you bother to read books that are recommended to you?"

It's who recommends them he says. And the work itself.  "Who's opinion is it", he asks, "and why do they deserve it?"

I ask him why he bothers to write down ever book ever mentioned in the works of Borges, Miller, or Colin Wilson, all of whom he's told me make the best recommendations for books.

"It's all about pleasure for me. I only read it because I like it."

So let's get away from the whole recommendations thing then. "How can you judge female American writers based on just Welty and Munroe?"

He doesn't. He likes Sylvia Plath and Amy Hemple. Still I refuse to let him off the hook because whereas I go out of my way to support female writers in general, his reading is predominantly male.

I tell him I don't understand why he'd make such a blanket statement. Why not he says.

Have you ever read Wharton I ask him? No.

What about Carson McCullers? She's genius he says. Harper Lee is also a genius apparently.

I keep at it, citing other female American writers. He conceeds. But in the end it doesn't matter does it? He prefers male authors. Is it because most books published are written by men? Does he think that female writers can't be as good as men?

Not at all he says. But he reads most male writers because he's a man and there's more of them. I certainly wish that we women had this luxury. Of the 100 books on Time's list of the All Time 100 Novels only 18 of the books were written by women and two of those 18 were written by Virginia Woolf.

So my question to my readers is, who are you favourite female authors? They obviously need our support.

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Borges and La Bibliothèque des Mots

While most of the la Bibliothèque des Mots  is comprised of fiction books, a quarter of the books are merely for reference. I admit I will buy almost any sort of reference book if I think it might contain a little tidbit of information that will contribute to my writing. I like to think of my library as something Jorge Luis Borges would approve of and considering the number of books I have bought solely because they were somewhere mentioned in his works, he probably would.

To get you started on building a library Borges would approve of, here's a short list of books mentioned in Borges work that no library would be complete without:

1. Sir Richard Burton's 16 volumes of The Arabian Nights or "Alf-layla wa-layla" in Arabic.
I own the edition printed by the Burton Club in 1950 that was limited to 1,000 printings. It's quite expensive, but can be found on ABEbooks. The version I own is in 16 volumes, but the original 1885 printing is 17 volumes. Try to stay away from Lady Burton's edition however as it was strictly for "ladies" and has had all the juicy bits edited out.

And no, I have not read all 16 volumes because well obviously Scheherazade, the legendary Persian queen and storyteller of The Arabian Nights is a far better woman than me.

2. The Dream of the Red Chamber, Tsao Hsueh-Chin (also known as A Dream of Red Mansions)
Borges called this book "an almost infinite novel". It contains 421 characters; 189 of whom are woman, and 232 men. The Dream of Pao-Yu prefigures that chapter in Lewis Carroll where Alice dreams of the Red King who is dreaming her except that Carroll's dream is a metaphysical fantasy, Pao-Yu's is charged with sadness, despair, and a deep irreality.  If that doesn't convince you there is also a chapter on wanking.

3. The Odyssey, Homer
I have many copies of the Odyssey, but my favourite translation of Homer's work thus far is Lattimore's. I also own Fagles' translation, which is considered more contemporary but no less brilliant. If you'd like to know what you should look for when selecting a translation of The Odyssey or The Illiad, this is a very helpful link: On Translating Homer.

Borges liked Homer's adjectives such as "the wine dark sea", "the nourishing earth", "damp waves". In Borges' The Total Library there is an essay called "The Homeric Versions", where Borges discusses the translations and says that "thus a good film seen a second time seems even better". So basically Borges is saying you need to read Homer over and over again and which translation might not matter. However I personally implore you to stay away from Lamb's translation unless you like a serious scholarly challenge.

4. The Divine Comedy, Dante Aligheri
No library - Borges' or otherwise - would be complete without The Divine Comedy. Borges praised the Dent & Sons edition originally printed in 1901, whose three volumes Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso have Italian on one page and the English translation on the other. Borges read The Divine Comedy for the first time when he was 35, while taking the street cars to and from his job at the library. The interesting little bit about this is Borges read the English page while he read Inferno and by the time he started reading Purgatorio he was reading in English. "At the moment when Dante is abandoned by Virgil and finds himself alone and calls out to him at that moment I felt I could read the Italian text directly." So yes, Hell was English and Italian purgatory, but don't take it personally because Borges was a huge Anglophile (like Madame Mimi).

5. Sweet's The Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse
Read towards the end of his life, Sweet's Anglo-Saxon reader helped Borges to rediscover his ancestry as Borges grandmother was of English descent. Borges said about The Anglo-Saxon Reader; "I thought I have lost the visible world (Borges went blind) but now I'm going to recover another".

6. Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas de Quincey
Borges claimed that, "I owed to de Quincey to whom my debt is vast that to point out only one part of it may appear to repudate or silence the others". 

If you need further convincing Confessions of an English Opium Eater was also a big source of inspiration to Yves Saint Laurent, who believed that eating hashish helped him to be a better createur. In fact, in my humble opinion Yves Saint Laurent may be the greatest designer the world has ever known. Though drugs contributed to his poor health, his collections imply that his inspiration was not limited to hash eating, even if he did name his most famous perfume "Opium".

7. Heaven and Hell, Emanuel Swedenborg
Swedenborg was a genius who wrote in Latin and believed that one could visit Heaven and Hell as if one were taking a day trip. He also believed he could talk to angels (I think Philip Pullman took some inspiration from Swedenborg for his trilogy "His Dark Materials", but when I spoke to Pullman I was so in awe of him that I forgot to ask, will post the question to his blog, and if he responds update in the comments section.)

Borges liked Swedenborg for his crazy ideas, for example "from a symbollic reading of the Bible he [Swedenborg] went on to do a symbollic reading of the universe." Borges even wrote a poem about Swedenborg.

Taller than the others, this man
Walked among them, at a distance,
Now and then calling the angels
By their secret names. He would see
That which earthly eyes do not see:
The fierce geometry, the crystal
Labyrinth of God and the sordid
Milling of infernal delights.
He knew that Glory and Hell too
Are in your soul, with all their myths;
He knew, like the Greek, that the days
Of time are Eternity's mirrors.
In unadorned Latin he went on listing
The unconditional Last Things.

8. The 11th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
There are two celebrated editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the 9th and the 11th. The 11th is the last edition prior to the Encyclopedia Britannica transitionning to an American publication and carries over a lot of the text found in the 9th, but was the first to include an index. Many noted scholars contributed to both editions including Bertrand Russell, Edmund Gosse, and William Michael Rossetti.  While most of the information would be now outdated, so not suitable for scholarly purposes, it was for Borges a very important set of books.

9. Mathematics and the Imagination, Edward Kasner and James R. Newman
Highly considered to be the first book to explain the complex aspects of mathematics to the layperson, it is a truly fascinating book even for someone who has studied advanced mathematics there are plenty of things one has never heard of and is written to enchant. Yes, Madame Mimi finds mathematics enchanting. You might too after checking out this book.

10. Ulysses, James Joyce
Borges was the frst traveller from the Hispanic world to set foot the shores of Ulysses, a "lush wilderness". Borges said of Joyce, "Joyce is less of a man of letters than a literature and incredibly he is a literature within the compass of a single volume".

Still, considering there are two copies on the shelf (and one Bodley Head edition recently given away to a friend) and two companion books to Ulysses such as The New Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires and Ulysses by Stuart Glibert that Joyce himself helped write, I have not made it past the first twenty pages and for this I feel a certain amount of shame. I've often said I should lock myself in a room until I finished it, but this has yet to happen.

I asked a friend, who first read Ulysses when he was 22, "One read Ulysses", he responded "for the same reason you climb mountains. It's a slog (UK English meaning task, drag), but it's rewarding [to read Ulysses] and funny. It's actually hilarious in parts."

He offered me the example of "the bit where he hangs off a ledge by his eyelids", which is pretty much the way I felt just reading those 20 pages.

Books of Jorge Luis Borges that no library would be complete without:

1. The Total Library
2. Fictions
3. The Book of Fantasy
4. Book of Imaginary Beings
5. The Aleph
6. Universal History of Infamy
7. Extraordinary Tales

While all of Borges' work is worth a look, one book in particular is my favourite and that is The Book of Fantasy. The Wiki page for this book says that Extraordinary Tales is a translation of The Book of Fantasy, but upon closer examination that is inaccurate. I will do some more research into the claim and see what I can find and update through the comments section.

Perhaps if you read a few books that Borges loved and books that he wrote you will better understand the quote I scratched in pencil on the underside of one of the pieces of wood used to build the shelves for La Bibliothèque des Mots.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

And for those of you for whom I built this "Paradise", because the books were never just for me but for all my friends, I will never, ever tell you where this inscription is because it's the one part of Paradise that is just for me.

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À Rebours, J-K Huysmans

Every once in awhile you open a book and it speaks to you in a way that seems to make you think it's come along for some express purpose. Such is the case when I began reading J-K Huysmans' "À Rebours", which translates to "Against Nature" or "Against the Grain".

My father used to say that he believed if people shut their mouths and opened a book, the world would be a much better place. He was constantly seeing parts of the world most people would chose to ignore. The bombings in Beirut; the fall of some dictator only to replaced by another; how much money there was to be made just across this border or that. He often came home visibly exhausted to shut himself away in his library.

"...whither he could fly for refuge from the incessant deluge of human folly."

For my father when he had little need for anything else besides a library, though he was a man of many passions. He judged people by their libraries. He considered a vast library full of unimportant books to be vulgar, but my own little bookshelf at age seven earned a short nod of approval. I suppose if I could ask him now my father would say something along the lines of a man only need own one book, as long as it's a great one.

In the past few days I have often thought about what my Papa might say now if he saw my library. I think he would understand the joy I feel in seeing all my books in one place and be happy I've decided to be serious about my life as a writer.

As for me, I wasn't sure until I read this passage:

"...He searched the outer suburbs of the capital and presently discovered a cottage for sale, above Fontenay-aux-Roses, in a remote spot, far from all neighbours, near the Fort. His dream was fulfilled; in this district, still unspoilt by intruders from Paris, he was secure against all harassment...

As he thought over the new existence he meant to make for himself, he experienced a lively sense of relief, seeing himself just far enough withdrawn for the flood of Paris activity not to touch his retreat, yet near enough for the proximity of the metropolis to add a spice to his solitariness. Indeed, in view of the well-known fact that for a man to find himself in a situation where it is impossible for him to visit a particular spot is of itself quite enough to fill him with an instant wish to go there, he was really guarding himself, by thus not entirely barring the road, from any craving to renew intercourse with the world or any regret for having abandoned it..."

In modern days it's impossible to maybe feel the same level of isolation that Huysmans felt at the idea of retreating into the suburbs of Paris. These days more people live outside of Paris (Paris and its region is referred to as Ile de France than in Paris itself. And Paris isn't that far away from the suburbs anymore thanks to the Metro or the local trains. From the place in the country the train is a short walk or bus ride away and forty minutes later I can set my foot on the voies of Gare de Lyon. I don't think it'd be easier if we had a car because well, traffic can be quite horrible.

Within minutes of reaching Gare de Lyon yesterday I realised that Paris doesn't miss me when I'm away. She has kept going as pleased with herself as ever and perhaps a bit smug that I am forced to return at the end of the weekend. I know she had a hand in the forty minutes of queue I endured to simply buy a ticket to take the Metro and the torrential downpour I was subjected to whilst in suede shoes. And all because there are loose ends to be tied and things I left undone.

I must see so and so. I must get stuff to make kimchee. I want to have a really good cup of chocolat chaud. I want to stop by my favourite vintage store. I need a lamp for the country house and maybe a few things to hang up photos...so as much as a squawk about the madness of it all - I know already I'll have to stay in Paris all week. Then go to London. When will I get back to the country again?

But Huysmans would understand all too well my current predictament, "...purchases of all kinds still kept him perambulating the Paris streets, tramping the town from end to end..."

And there you have it.  The saddest reason of all to abandon my idyllic, fairytale came true, beautiful little cottage in the forest. SHOPPING. (and work, but I can't even get into what the hell is going on with work at the moment).

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More Book Buying Abroad

So I went to the US for a short trip of gambling, stocking up on American consumer goodness, and book buying. I visited a few fantastic bookshops but the best of all was Calico Cat Books in Ventura, California. Here I snapped up a rare edition of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the 1956 edition of Proust's In Search of Lost Time in 7 volumes, and a very nice copy of Journey to the West. At Starlight Books in Flagstaff Arizona I bought an odd book edited by Italo Calvino of Italian Fairytales, W. Somerset Maugham's book on Kipling, and a first edition of Knut Hamsun's Pan. This was an exciting purchase as it is an extremely rare printing by Knopf from 1921 after Hamsun won the Nobel.

Needless to say I came home with so many books that I had to rush to Walmart with my best friend THL at 3 in the morning to buy another suitcase and repack (after we drove back to Vegas for our flight back to Paris along Route 66) as we were a bit over the max weight limit per suitcase.

One thing I find amusing is that bookstores here in Paris are always trying to be more American and bookstores in the US are always trying to be more European. Europeans read a lot. But don't lose faith America - aside from the Les Pleiades, printed by Gallimard (which are for French people the ultimate editions and rightly so, they're AMAZING and cause me to drool whenever I see them) - American books are much better printed in general.

The real score of my American book buying was finding a first edition Charlotte's Web by EB White for $4.00!!!! No seriously. It even had a printing flaw, where the last chapter's start page had to be written in by hand...would be interested hearing from any collector's if this means anything? I'm adding this on my shelf beside my 1st American Edition of The Trumpet of the Swan, which is my favorite EB White Book.

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Books and Bindings

There are books that are like a wind through your life. They can send a shiver down your spine or offer up a refreshing breeze. They are random. If you had read them perhaps at another moment instead of that moment, perhaps they would have had no effect at all.



Then there are those other books. The books that you keep beneath your pillow, beside your bed, and in your heart.

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Recent Acquisitions

Books bought today:

T.S. Eliot, a Life - Peter Ackroyd
The Custom House of Desire, Half a Century of Surrealist Stories - Translated by J.H. Matthews
Mockingbird Wish Me Luck - Charles Bukowski
The King & The Corpse - Henrich Zimmer (edited by Joseph Campbell)
The History Man - Malcolm Bradbury
Writing, The Story of Alphabets and Scripts - Jean Georges
The Comfort of Strangers - Ian McEwan
The Egyptian Book of the Dead - E.A Wallis Budge
Problems of Leninism - Joseph Stalin
The Proper Bostonians - Cleland Amory
The Master and Magarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
Literary History of England
Myth & Legend - Thomas Bulfinch
The Light that Failed - Rudyard Kipling

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New Year's Reading Resolutions

I've decided I will devote each month of the year to reading either a) books only by a specific author, b) books on a specific subject, or c) one immense work that normally takes a month (i.e. say Ulysses).

The purpose of this is to make notes (I've loads of notebooks that must be put to use!) and see where reading the first author takes me either to another author or to a certain subject. So basically throughout the year I will progress naturally from a starting point.

After much thought, I've decided to start this experiment with Yukio Mishima and more specifically with Mishima's Sea of Fertility, his great masterpiece that is composed of four books: Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn,and The Decay of the Angel.

I also plan to read Madame de Sade and a biography on Mishima (by Henry Scott-Stokes) in order to find out what the month of February has in store.

So in short, if you do a search through my archives for Mishima, you can keep track and maybe predict where I might go next.

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More Recent Acquistions

Another good week of book buying...


Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Writings
Leon Uris - Trinity
DH Lawrence - The Plumed Serpent
William Faulkner - The Portable Faulkner (Edited by Cowley), Sound & The Fury
Stendhal - Scarlet and Black
E.N. de C. Andrade - Sir Issac Newton
Arthur Koestler - The Case of the Midwife Toad
Giuseppe di Lampedusa - The Leopard
Michael Tournier - Friday
Francois Rabelais - The Works of Rabelais
The Cid
Paul Verlaine - Selected Poems
Aldous Huxley - Antic Hay
Thomas Mann - Death in Venice and 7 Other Stories
Colette - Break of Day, Gigi and the Cat
Toni Morrison - Song of Solomon
Mark Twain - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Puddin' Head Wilson
Gertrude Stein - 3 Lives
The Journals of Andre Gide: 1889 - 1913, 1914 - 1927, 1928 - 1939, 1939 - 1949
Caesar's War Commentaries
C.S. Lewis - The Problem of Pain
Willa Cather - A Lost Lady
Lillian Smith - Strange Fruit
John Updike - Problems and Other Stories
Louisa May Alcott - A Long Fatal Love Chase
D.M. Hussey - The Byzantine World
Selected Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas
Confessions of Saint Augustine
Graham Greene - The Heart of Matter
Balzac - Drole Tales
Douglas R. Hoefstadter - The Praise of the Music of Language
Yusunari Kawabata - The Master of Go
T.E. Lawrence - The Mint
Richard Wright - Native Son
Edith Wharton - Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth
Isabel Allende - Of Love and Shadows
Gulot & Lake - The Life of Picasso
Michael Scott - Irish Animal Tales
Morio Kita - The Fall of the House of Nire
E.R. Dodds - The Greeks and the Irrationals
Richard Sullivan - Heirs of the Roman Empire
E.M. Forester - A Passage to India
Henry James - The Bostonians, Turn of the Screw & Daisy Miller
Virgil - The Georgics
Morton Smith - The Ancient Greeks
Solomon Katz - The Decline of Rome
Chester G. Starr, Jr. - The Emergence of Rome as Ruler of Western World
Eramus - The Praise of Folly
Plato - The Last Days of Socrates
Huhm - Kut, Korean Shaman Rituals
Paul Gallico - The Small Miracle
Boccacio - On Poetry
Arthur O. Lovejoy - The Great Chain of Being
Bruno Snell - The Discovery of the Mind
Andre Maurois - Lelia, The Life of George Sand
George Gulls - Biography of Mae West
Radclyfee Hall - The Well of Loneliness
Evelyn Waugh - Men at Arms
The Plays of Oscar Wilde

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The Pre-NY's Clean Up

The new year is approaching and so, bored out of my mind I decided to rearrange the books.

I should have taken some photos during the process - when there were books going up the stairs and me up to me cloxters (sp?) in Beckett.

Here is the first snap. One bookshelf uses a heavenly quirky system.

First shelf: The bible under the lost books of the bible and Colin Wilson's The Occult. Random serious thinkers like Emerson,Kahil Gibran, Nietsche, and Rabelais. Complex scientific books, chess strategy books, Philip K. Dick, the letters of Mozard, biographies on Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner. A book on art.

Second shelf: Greek mythology, Plato's The Symposium, 3 Volume set of Gibbon's Roman Empire, erotica like Bataille's L'Histoire d'Oeil, Rimbaud, Blake, and Shakespeare.

Third shelf: sadly only three volumes by African authors and then starts the hugenormous American lit section breaking at Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn and continuing on the fourth shelf with Miller's Rosy Cruxification. The fourth shelf gets us past Vonnegut and Wharton and ends with Tobias Wolfe.

Fifth shelf: pretty much starts with Beckett and Joyce with a few other Irish authors in between before going into English lit with Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy sitting comfortably next to a few volumes of Chesterton.

Sixth shelf continues where the fifth stopped adding Gerald and Lawrence Durrell, Philip Larkin, and Pound's ABC of Reading. The sixth shelf also gets to bear the burden of my Somerset Maugham obsession. I have a stunning set of his short stories printed by Folio Society which can be a bit hard to get your hands on, a pleuthora of paperbacks including The Moon and Sixpence (my second favorite of his works after The Razor's Edge) and a first addition of his Writer's Notebook, which was a birthday gift from someone extremely sexy to me. I mean dear.

Seventh shelf has a bit of English including my budding collection of Evelyn Waugh. So far I've collected his diaries, the complete collection of his short stories, Put Out More Flags, and A Little Learning.

The rest of the shelf has a mix of European authors such as Hamsun, Kundera, Strindberg, and Sebald.

By the time I was tired and feeling much less motivated. Since I decided to organize by type of literature I still had: Russian, Asian, French, and loads of biographies, oversized books, and odd one offs like a book on Jack the Ripper. Where does one keep the Ripper?

As you can see, I also don't have enough shelf space. In my perfect world, one of the things I would require to be perfect would be bookshelves. They would never be too shallow for bigger books or too deep for littler ones. As you can see the problem with the second bookshelf was that it's far too deep for paperbacks.

The top has the most room, so the most books. Over half the shelf is various Asian literature including (drum roll please)...All the books from Mishima's Sea of Fertility (Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of the Angel)! Soseki, Murakami, and a little known book called The Gay Genius. The little chunk left is stacked with Russian and Latin American/Hispanic Literature, including my new favorite Unamuno and my old favorite Asturias.

The rest of the shelf isn't worth taking about except a few great memoirs (The Words, Jean Paul Sartre and Rodin's On Art and Artists).

Still, I got the job done.

Then I thought, why not further refine the system?

But only for a second. I did go through and pull out books I wanted to remember to read, but I'm not touching a thing otherwise!

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